Corvin didn’t even have time to ask what that meant.

The pain hit him instantly. It felt like severe, catastrophic heartburn, followed immediately by the horrifying realization that the heartburn had fingers.

"G-GAAAHK!" Corvin choked, collapsing forward onto the glass console.

His white silk suit suddenly bulged at the center of his chest. The fabric tore with a sickening ripping sound. But it wasn’t blood and bone that pushed its way out of his sternum. It was pure, violently glitching green code.

Sebastian forcefully utilized his compressed state, pushing his physical rendering partially out of Corvin’s biological framework. A large, masculine hand, completely covered in jagged green and black static, physically tore its way out of the administrator’s chest.

Corvin sobbed in pure, unadulterated horror, his body paralyzed by the sheer invasive trauma, as the static-filled hand reached down and violently grabbed the glowing hardware of the console.

Sebastian didn’t type on the holographic keyboard. He physically ripped the pristine glass panel open, exposing the raw, humming blue mana-wires beneath.

"Time to upload the virus," Sebastian’s distorted voice echoed directly from the exposed green code jutting out of Corvin.

Sebastian’s fingers, crackling with the raw, 10,000x multiplied processing power of his [Code Compiler], plunged directly into the open circuitry. He violently forcefully shoved a completely custom, highly illegal payload into the system’s root directory. It was the virus coded by Corbin the rogue mechanic, heavily modified by Sebastian’s own conceptual laws.

BZZZZT!

The entire room shook. The golden spire in the center of the room violently flickered, the pristine blue mana flowing through its cables instantly turning a sickly, bruised purple.

Alarms immediately began to blare. Red warning lights strobed across the room.

[CRITICAL SECURITY BREACH DETECTED.] [UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO MULTIVERSAL BROADCAST FEED.] [INITIATING LOCKDOWN.]

"Too slow," Sebastian grunted.

He accessed the multiversal feed. He ripped control of the cameras, the audio receivers, and the skybox projections away from the Grand Archons. He forced the network to open a direct, unencrypted line to every single active player interface across billions of worlds.

But he wasn’t going to show them his normal face. He wasn’t going to show them the tired, deadpan Drifter in a leather coat. If you want to break a system built on terror, you have to become the scariest thing in the room.

He resurrected his combat persona.

The green static pouring out of Corvin’s chest rapidly expanded, rendering a massive, holographic projection right in the center of the relay room. It fed the image directly into the broadcast.

The figure that materialized was towering, easily eight feet tall. It was composed entirely of shifting, deep black static and erratic green error strings. It wore a long, tattered cloak of pure shadows that seemed to actively absorb the ambient light.

And on its face, it wore a perfectly smooth, pristine porcelain mask. The mask was cracked down the exact center. From the empty, pitch-black eye sockets, thick streams of oily, digital black blood wept continuously.

The Glitch was live.

Across the multiverse, reality stuttered. On the burning wastelands of dying servers, on the pristine, high-fantasy streets of Elven kingdoms, and deep inside the horrific dungeons of the Void, every single player’s UI violently flickered.

The skyboxes above them shattered. The standard blue system menus forcefully minimized.

In their place, a colossal, terrifying projection of the weeping porcelain mask filled the heavens.

"Testing, testing. Is this thing on?"

Sebastian’s voice boomed.

It wasn’t a normal voice. It was a horrific, overlapping chorus of three different audio files playing simultaneously. It sounded like grinding metal, TV static, and a low, resonant hum that physically vibrated the bones of anyone listening.

"Citizens of the Ethereal Plane. Players, NPCs, and completely brainwashed Warlords," The Glitch announced, the massive mask tilting slightly in the sky. "You have been told that this universe is a test. You have been told that your suffering is a necessary crucible to forge you into gods."

Down in the relay room, Corvin watched the massive projection through his tear-filled eyes, his chest still painfully held open by Sebastian’s digital arm.

"It’s a lie," Sebastian’s distorted voice continued, dripping with absolute contempt.

"The System is not a benevolent creator. It is a slaughterhouse. It uses your desperation, your greed, and your fear to harvest your souls into batteries. And right now, the managers of this fine establishment are throwing a massive clearance sale to pay for their own mistakes."

The porcelain mask leaned closer to the camera, the black, oily tears splashing down into the void.

"I am the Anomaly," Sebastian declared, fully embracing the villainous role the System had assigned him. "I am the bug in the machine.

And I am issuing a server-wide patch update. The game is broken. The rules are void. And I am coming to format the hard drive." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

He didn’t just want to scare them. He wanted to completely disrupt the System’s momentum. He wanted to shatter the illusion of control the Archons maintained.

"Stay tuned," The Glitch whispered, the sound echoing like a death knell across a billion planets. "We now return to your regularly scheduled programming. But pay close attention. You’re going to want to see this."

While Sebastian was busy forcibly hacking the multiversal network from inside a terrified bureaucrat’s chest, the System was actively running its own desperate propaganda campaign.

Before The Glitch had violently hijacked the feed, the entire Ethereal Plane had been forced to watch the conclusion of the "Eternal Draft." It was the Grand Archons’ panic button. To generate the massive amounts of processing power needed to hunt Sebastian, they had initiated global deathmatches across every single assimilated world simultaneously.

Millions of desperate, low-level players had been teleported into inescapable arenas and told that only one could survive. The winner would receive youth, a divine weapon, and a ticket to the absolute safety of the Inner Worlds.

The broadcast feed shifted. The colossal, weeping mask of The Glitch faded into the background, operating as a picture-in-picture overlay. The primary video feed forcefully dragged the attention of the multiverse back to the ’official’ broadcast.